Ruggiero Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci is often categorized as a "verismo" work,
that is, an opera emerging in Italy during the late nineteenth century from the
short-lived "realist" school. Such operas, filled with highly charged emotional
music, tell of everyday people in familiar situations who behave impetuously
and feel primitive emotion. Yet I Pagliacci really remains true to the great nineteenth-century romantic tradition of Italian opera. The music is filled with
lusciously romantic harmonies and is conservative when compared to the prior
chromatic achievements of Richard Wagner and the contemporary sounds of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Giacomo Puccini. Moreover, by permitting
his actors to perform the roles of commedia dell'arte characters who live out
their passions both onstage in the fantasy portion of the libretto and off in the
real-life sections, Leoncavallo follows the device of a play-within-a-play that
was used by that protoromantic, William Shakespeare, whom the nineteenthcentury romantics venerated, and that would be copied time and again thereafter.

DESCRIPTION AND ANALYSIS

The passions revealed amid I Pagliacci's real-life ambiance are those of
lower-class entertainers trying to eke out a living through their itinerant performances in small Italian towns in the 1890s, but they and their emotions are
as large and exaggerated as those of many medieval and Renaissance heroes
and heroines of the earlier romantic operas of Donizetti, Bellini, and Verdi.

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